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December 12, 2012

In "De Profundis" - the artist’s first one-man show at the ALBERTINA - sculptor Erwin Wurm shows a new group of works. Photographies show his friends, most of them artists or in the art business and posing in a body language unusually "unmodern" in this media but well known from the gothic or renaissance. By painting over them with brush and acrylic - taking away here and adding masses there - Wurm avoids simple voyeuristic recognizing and adds a sculpural quality. Dec 12,2012 - Feb 17, 2013.

December 07, 2012

In her installation "Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum" in the main room of the SECESSION YAEL BARTANA addresses the spirits of two pioneers, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl who, in different approaches sought to bring redemption to the individual and to the collective. The founder of modern psychoanalysis and the visionary of a state for Jews lived just a couple of houses away from each other on Berggasse in Vienna, yet their paths never crossed. Yael Bartana brings them together in a temple of Utopia to create a moment of collective consciousness and awake the ghost of history to hopefully get some answers. She declares both the spiritual gods of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), which she founded in 2007, a fictional movement dealing with political imagination calling for the return of 3.300.000 Jews to Poland to right the wrongs history has imposed and to reclaim the promise of a utopian future that all citizens deserve.

In her film retaped Rape (2012) and a series of photographs documenting the making of the film FIONA RUKSCHCIO deals with the roles assigned to women, with identity construction, and with extreme emotional experiences. The film takes its cue and structure from Rape by Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1969 in which the camera pursues a young woman through London back to her apartment, the woman appears flattered at first, but becomes increasingly anxious and deeply disturbed. Rukschcio re-filmed the work, recreating the same shots at the original locations, but without the woman.

With her exhibition, LIZ DESCHENES touches on two fields of interest: architecture and exhibition displays. "The reference is cameras as rooms," she says,"'Camera' literally means room in Latin, with that in mind I'll reframe the configurations of these rooms using the photograms." Her works are made by exposing photographic paper for several hours, out of doors, mostly at night, before fixing it and treating it with toners. The chemicals leave streaks and spots, and there are hand- and fingerprints from the artist's handling of the material. Dec 7, 2012 - Feb 10, 2013.